Re: Layering: 'For a moment, she stood in silence'

On Oct 19, 5:03 pm, Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
ShellyS <shell...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
ShellyS <shell...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cool. I got that from something someone (maybe Patricia) said years
ago elsewhere about revising to take out unnecessary words, of
which I tend to have many.

:)

Was there something about how to turn rambling (about important
information) into something readable?
Not that I recall. I tend to ramble. A lot. Sometimes, using a bigger
word to replace 3 smaller ones works, but usually, for me, it's a
word I wouldn't normally use and is jarring.

I don't think that would cut it down much in my case. :)

That some words don't sound right (feel, rather) is familiar, though.

I rely a lot on how things sound or feel to me. If someone asks me why
something feels wrong, or right, I have to really think about it and I
don't always have an answer, or not one that makes sense. ;)

I've sometimes broken up my beloved run-on sentences into smaller ones
and moved them around a bit and that sometimes helps.

Oh, yes!

(I think I've found my good twin - I'm the evil one in any case - as
much of what you say rings true.)

I used to be evil, but I'm trying very hard to reform. ;)
Other times, it makes it more confusing.

Or the order looks wrong.

Yeah. The words have to flow "right," whatever "right" is.

The more info I can get into dialogue, the better, because
while I don't always succeed in giving each character a unique voice,
I tend to do better with dialogue than exposition.

<nod>

And I break it up with other characters asking questions, so there
isn't a long paragraph of lecture.

History being revealed by someone telling a tale is better than someone
knowing it rambling on, too.

Yes.

I've got one scene where a mini-flashback (looking a day or so back)
explains why a character is <here> now rather than <there>, and I keep
wondering whether I shouldn't turn that into a scene. (It's just two
paragraphs, without anything else happening around it, it just says how
and why he came back. And it's humorous, not a dramatic event.)

I'd like some comments on that (whether to leave it as it is or try to
shape a scene around it where nothing else happens (the story is much
further along), so I'll dump it at the end of this post (with the line
before and the short paragraph after the ones in question).

Okay. I used to love flashbacks, but I'm trying to be more careful
when and how I use them. I like using them as dreams, or nightmares,
or at a moment when someone really would think about the past incident
or even tell someone else about it and then I transition into the
actual incident, then pull back to the present time scene. That
doesn't work well, for me, if the incident is nothing much happening,
though.

In the WIR, the protag is guest lecturing at a class in political
systems and I use the students answering his questions to cover the
political situation at the start of the book.

Looks useful.

But what do you do when everyone knows what's going on, without reason
to talk about it, and you have to get that across _before_ it's
violated? :)

In the case of the students, the class was introductory and the protag
wanted to get them to see beyond the obvious, ie comparing politics on
Mars with what goes on back on Earth. It also helped introduce the
students and their opinions, one of whom figures into the plot later.
A second student also has a small role in the plot later. It also
addressed the attitudes of the younger generation on Mars.

I think if you can make the scene do something else as well as give
the info, the info doesn't stand out as much as an infodump. Even the
characters sitting around and arguing about something can reveal a lot
about the something. Since I'm also dealing with an investigation, the
investigators, including the protag, get to discuss what's known so
far and speculate on more a lot.

I guess the question would be why don't they have a reason to discuss
it. And then, how could you generate a reason? I remember an episode
of Hill Street Blues that really annoyed me. For those who don't know
the show, it revolved around a squad of detectives. In the episode,
one of the cops asked another about something he was working on and
his answer was the explanation the viewers needed, but that other cop
should've known all that and it rang false. What really bugged me was
the show had a built-in character who could've served as the
questioner: the ex-wife of the squad's commander. She was always
hanging around and the info wasn't something she couldn't know if
asked, because it didn't include names or other info that could hurt a
case. I don't know why they didn't use her since she was fairly
curious.

So since then, I've had it in the back of my mind that characters who
ask questions should have reasons for asking them that fit, not just
to make conversation. And if they ask something they already know,
that should be for a reason, too. Working in the right characters to
do this is the key. I wish I could say I planned the whole student
scene ahead of time, but I didn't. It was a scene of opportunity. In
the original version, the protag was a teacher. When I changed him to
a journalist, I kept the scene because it served the purpose and I
couldn't think of anything better, so I made him a guest lecturer to
give him a reason to be in that classroom.

<sigh>

I don't expect you to come up with an answer, I'm just thinking aloud.


Understood. And if my rambling response helps trigger your own ideas,
all the better. :)

The plot is centered around a disaster that can affect the first
presidential election on Mars, so explaining who the candidates are
and what their platforms are is important to establish early on.

Makes sense.

It's more a feeling of 'this is right here/has to be done before that'
rather than any knowledge about structure, for me, but I know what you
mean.


I know next to nothing about structure. One of my friends is a whiz at
structure and she can find patterns and structure in what I write. I
never see it. Since I write as I go, one thing just leads to another
and then I need to show what other pov characters are doing and I
switch when it feels right. In version 2 of the first draft, I had a
new character show up and she really worked, so I had to go back and
add her into scenes where she normally would also appear. But mostly,
I work forward.

R.L. suggested that I insert a scene where all the information from the
rambling is shown, before '*** happens', but the more I think about it,
the more it seems unfitting in the same sense. The story starts with X,
I know that is the absolute start, and there's only room before it for
the sort-of-prologue that I added to have something in the second book
not come out of the blue (the survival of certain characters that
everyone thinks dead - they're in that sort-of-prologue, without names
but with enough to put everything together in book one, leaving the
reader with more information than the main characters have). A rare case
of not overdoing it, for me.


I tried to move the first scene of the WIR to earlier and I thought I
could build in more suspense because beta readers thought it started
too slow. And it sucked. Because the first scene was the first scene
and nothing else felt right. What I ended up changing was inserting
new scenes after the second scene to add suspense and I removed a lot
of the lecture/talkie scenes to compensate. Prologues are funny
things. I love reading them when they're well done (often set years
before the story starts because the incident will impact the plot or
forms the plot, especially in a suspense type story in any genre), but
writing them is something I rarely do. I rarely have a good enough
reason to use them.

Another reason I tried to move the start to a few days earlier was to
show the protag before his life changed so readers had something to
compare him with, but then, aside from the suckage, I realized there
was an incident a few years before that that changed him and I
couldn't start back that far, so I had to trust the reader to like him
from where the story needed to start. I tightened up the original
scene, dropped extraneous crap, and built up the emotions of the
moment, the descriptions, etc and I think it works better now. A lot
of his backstory comes out later, in his thoughts, when he's faced
with a similar incident to the one in the past.

Then I can delve deeper into that. Of course, in earlier versions,
there were two other student/teacher scenes which I cut for the
current version because it was repetitious and didn't add anything I
couldn't do better with something else.

Reminds me of something I've overdone while correcting an impression,
now I've got three characters thinking much the same, at different
points. <sigh>

Yes. The danger of fixing something by adding more of what isn't
needed. I do that a lot. ;)

They're far enough apart that I don't have all three in the utmost
active part of my mind while rereading, to compare and find which is
best to keep.

You might be able to make them just different enough that you can keep
all three, if they're far enough apart.

(snip)

And reading the bit again now, I also think I've got 'stare' as
passage of time combined with an actual action relatively often.
Only where appropriate, but perhaps my caracters do excessively
blink, stare, swallow,... Hm... (I think I wondered about having
swallow too often while writing, too.)
This must be a common problem. I use staring, glaring, glowering,
swallowing a lot, even blinking sometimes. And sometimes, I just say
he or she paused to consider his/her answer. It feels lazy, but I
haven't found better ways for a lot of that. If I don't overdo, I
think, I hope, it's okay.

As someone pointed out, there is a difference between the viewpoint
character doing it, and someone observing it. With the viewpoint
character, the considered answers may be shown instead (while someone
observing rarely knows that considering the answer is what's going on in
the pause).

That's where my pov character thinks that the other person seems to be
considering his/her answer! Basically, I have my pov characters pass
judgment on what the other characters are doing or thinking. And yes,
I can overdo that, too. Because not all the characters would or should
do that.
<snip>

In something else I've written, I have a psychologist character who
is always pushing his glasses up his nose. He does it to disarm his
patients as well as to give himself a moment to think. So he'd do
that, then speak and it worked fairly nicely.

I can see that work well (as long as it isn't too often and ends up
standing out, but I think that much depends on how it's done).

What do you mean by 'disarm his patients'?
Make them think he's not as shrewd as he is, that he's a comfortable,
favorite uncle type of person, easy to be around. In the story I
wrote, the patient was good at fooling shrinks, but he was able to
relax more with this one and ended up finally revealing his deepest
fear.

That's done by pushing up his glasses? Hm.

Well, it was a fannish story and the readership is easy to please, but
yeah, it was part of the overall befuddled personality the character
projected. There were some other things, but that was the main thing I
used.


But I guess there's more to it to give that impression of a favorite
uncle type.

Here's the bit I warned about above. :)

Context: After the battle against the baddies, the tribes' armies stay
camping for a bit, delayed by various things. The camps are mixed, with
small numbers of each tribe within sight of the others, but the ones
from the Fire tribe 'fled' from their areas to the areas where the
Breeders that were freed are tended (never mind why they 'fled').

Mentioned characters: Tashen (viewpoint charcter), Magic Priest (grew up
in the Fire tribe, lives in the Winter tribe)

Dasca, Summer Breeder (not afraid of Lords, unlike the others)

Lanar, Winter Lord, Gorash's son (known for being a silly sod)
Wariel, Fire Lord, Wegyn's son
Shanos, Fire Priest, Tashen's (half-)brother
Gorash, Winter Lord, leader of the Winter tribe
Wegyn, Fire lord, leader of the Fire tribe

(Tashen, Wariel, and Shanos went searching for the baddies with Gorash
(finding Dasca on the way), Lanar travelled with the Fire tribe when the
armies followed after the baddies were found.)

----
[...]
"I'll come along and make sure you don't get lost." Lanar decided.

After Wariel and Shanos had fled along with the other Fire tribe people,
Wegyn had informed Wariel and Lanar that he wasn't in the mood for two
louts, and one of then could just as well go back pestering Gorash. That
was Shanos' version of it, when he contacted Tashen about the Winter
Lord being on the way. Lanar had come into their camp, announcing in
mock outrage that Wegyn had cast him out for freezing his toes off,
apparently a dire offense in the Fire tribe that no one had told him
about.

The Summer Breeders that more or less hid with them had looked startled.
Lanar had exclaimed that that was his favorite hobby, and whether he may
not continue with theirs, slumping down next to one of them, grinning
silly. She and the others had shrunk back, shaking their heads. He had
sighed exaggeratedly, then spotted Dasca and asked what she thought
about the idea. She had grinned, looked at her outstretched feet, and
concluded that they would look silly without toes, and he better find
himself a different hobby. Lanar had conceeded that she did have a point
there, and asked about that juggling he had heard about.

He now accompanied them, walking on the other side of Dasca, trying to
juggle three of the flake-stones, as she had called them. Tashen
wondered whether the choice of colours, orange, white and black, had any
significance. Tashen still wore white, for now.
[...]
----


Okay, just off the top of my head, this is too long to be done this
way. It is a mini-scene and it's passive. Not knowing what you're
going for here or why it all has to be in here, my thoughts will
likely be off-base, but I'll risk it.

I'd try two things and see which works better. Write the scene and
insert it where it would belong. This would require I come up with a
real reason for the scene, which could be as simple as the pov
character learning something about himself or the others that can be
used later. If I could add in a little problem that can be resolved
within the scene -- Look out, a bear! -- all the better. It could be a
bonding thing. Who knows? And maybe I can use it to do something a
later scene did and I can remove it from that later scene.

The second thing would be to try to condense what's needed into half
the sentences. Sometimes, that's harder for me than writing another
scene.

A third thing, which might not work here at all, would be to break
that up and integrate it more into the actual scene.

-- Shelly

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